Suicide: a Socratic revenge.

ABSTRACT

2400 years have passed since the occurrence in Athens, Greece of one of the famous suicides recorded in human history. This autobiographical essay provides a montage on the history of suicide, with snippets from the final hours of Socrates, as described by Plato. Suicide in contemporary Japanese culture is also explored briefly, with reference to the deaths of internationally acclaimed movie directors Akira Kurosawa and Juzo Itami. The author also questions why no researcher has yet been honoured for the past 99 years with a Medicine Nobel prize for his or her work on suicidology or thanatology.